SCP are pleased to announce that the outcomes from Carl Clerkin’s Beasley Brothers Repair Shop, currently part of the ongoing Eternally Yours exhibition at Somerset House, will be exhibited at SCP. A selection of the products are now available to preview at the SCP showroom. The exhibition of all outcomes will be displayed from 4–12 October, culminating with an auction on the evening of 12th October.
As part of the Eternally Yours exhibition, Somerset House commissioned Carl Clerkin to build a functioning repair shop in their gallery.
SCP along with Very Good and Proper, Ercol, Pearson Lloyd, Jasper Morrison Studio and John Tree Studio have all donated components to the shop. Broken parts, excess stock and waste material were sent to be repurposed. Carl Clerkin and a host of designer-makers set to work, breathing life into unwanted materials, creating entirely new products from candelabras to floor lights, and furniture.
Repairers include:
Neil Austin
Carl Clerkin
Dean Edmonds
Gitta Gschwendtner
Jon Harrison
Alex Hellum
Lucy Kurrein
Jacob Marks
Michael Marriott
Freddie Robins
A selection of the products are now available to preview at the SCP showroom. An exhibition of all the outcomes will be displayed from 4–12 October, culminating with an auction on the evening of 12th October.
Auction | 12 October, 6-9pm
Arrive from 6pm for a 7pm start. Please register for your free ticket here.
Beasley Brothers Story
Words by Carl Clerkin
The original Beasley Brothers repair shop was at 100 Murray Grove, Hackney, London.
And was run by three brothers, one blind, one death and one imaginary, who, from their shop would repair more or less anything, TV’s, radios and all sorts of other electrical products, vacuum cleaners, food mixers, paper shredders, dust busters, hair dryers, washing machines and such, as well as electrical goods, they fixed bikes, lawn mowers, heeled shoes, and would even put a patch on your pants.
“If you can break it, we can fix it” said their sign.
And fix it they would…
They were named, Robert Charles Alfred Beasley, Charles Alfred Eric Beasley and Alfred Eric Charles Beasley, after their father, Eric Alfred Robert Charles Beasley.
Whilst Robert and Charles worked the shop during the day no one ever really saw Alfred, or Elf as he became known, as he always worked through the night.
People would say that you were better off not having a same day repair and that leaving your broken bits in the shop over night for Elf to work on, was always a better fix.
The older people in the area would say that those same brothers had been in that shop fixing things for over a hundred years – and no one ever doubted this, even with the knowledge that block, in which the shop sat, was only built in 1967.
Neither did they question how the death brother fixed radios?
Or the blind one TVs?
When things were made to be fixed rather than not to be, the brothers were what the locals considered a vital community service.
But things eventually changed…
You could now get a newer, flatter, more colourful TV in Sainsbury’s, along with your weekly shop and sadly people saw this as a being more convenient….
For the majority of the time the brothers got things fixed, as they were the masters of repair.
But when stopped bringing in their repairs, the brothers began finding discarded object in the street, which they would make good, using any working parts or materials to create new things, giving new life to old redundant things became their work, in fact some say that before the Beasleys, there was no such thing as up-cycling.
Sadly the shop closed down in 2007 and that was the last anyone saw of the Beasleys.
